Hudson Yards Is the Hotel California of New York

I'll say this for Hudson Yards, the twenty-five-billion-dollar, twenty-eight-acre development that has risen, like some Tolkien tower, on the far West Side of Manhattan: it would be a great setting for a breakdown. At first, the unremitting artificiality of the place seems merely novel. You ascend from the spotless 7-train platform, push through turnstiles branded with Neiman Marcus advertising, and emerge onto a plaza that bears the same relation to New York City as a police-sketch artist’s drawing does to a face. Someone has heard of the city that Hudson Yards is nominally part of; there is an honest-to-God hot-dog vender to prove it, and handsome, undulating benches to sit on as you admire the landscaping and breathe in the river air. But you have not come to Hudson Yards to eat hot dogs and sit on benches. You are there to climb the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick’s shawarma-shaped stairway to nowhere, and to wander the seven-story, seven-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-square-foot mall, designed by Kohn, Pedersen, Fox. Its interiors, by Elkus Manfredi, are sleek and opulent; the stores and restaurants gleam. Hours slip by. Your sips of the scented, trapped air are growing shallow. The piped-in music has begun to replace your inner monologue. You long to see a pigeon, to smell sun-baked urine, to gaze at the sun itself. You need to leave. You race outside and run south, where you are spat out onto the High Line, beneath mammoth condo-side advertisements for “luxe living” in “residences.” Are those like apartments? you wonder, as a squadron of selfie-takers sweeps by, pelting you in the stomach with glossy shopping bags: fade, expensively, to black.

Hudson Yards is built to impress, and, by some criteria, it does. There’s the sheer scale of its five glass towers, which house offices and, yes, “residences,” and pierce the New York City sky like so many porcupine quills; next year, an observation deck will open, eleven thousand feet in the air. Maybe some public good will come of the Shed, the five-hundred-thousand-square-foot arts space that is scheduled to open next month. The buffed metals, polished stones, and Apple Store-esque glass façades that decorate the mall’s interior are meant to telegraph tastefully deployed wealth, and this they do to perfection. There’s food of the star-chef variety, much of it astronomically priced—or ostentatiously not priced, as the case may be—and fancy tech: a truck-less garbage-disposal system that sounds like Willy Wonka’s chocolate chute; generators designed to withstand inevitable natural catastrophe. Speaking of natural catastrophe, the entire development is built on a platform over the city’s rail yards and outfitted with various locking and sealing mechanisms that are designed to keep the elevators functioning and the lights on, even when the big waves come. Hudson Yards is a ship that can’t be sunk. (Where have we heard that before?) As the rest of us are washed out to sea, we can take comfort in the thought of the lucky Noahs left behind to propagate the species in their gleaming arc.

But let’s stay in the here and now. As is increasingly common in New York City, Hudson Yards is a private space masquerading as a public one. It is the realized vision of one man, the developer Stephen Ross, the founder and chairman of Related Companies, who brought us the Time Warner Center a decade and a half ago. Ross, who will soon move into a penthouse at the development, calls his creation a neighborhood—“the neighborhood of the future,” in his company’s advertising lingo. In reality it is an enclave, a high-end corporate park buoyed by six billion dollars in tax breaks—an amount that dwarfs the subsidies offered to Amazon for its scuttled Queens headquarters—and designed as a kind of amenity-stuffed Hotel California that its residents never have to leave. (There are a limited number of so-called affordable units; in keeping with precedent in our city’s age of latter-day luxury, the people who live in them will have separate amenities, upstairs/downstairs style.) The only thing that Hudson Yards is missing is its own weather.

Yes, the rest of us can visit, but why would we? For all the hullabaloo and the expense—the two are indistinguishable—there’s not much at Hudson Yards that can’t be found elsewhere. The mall is a case in point. Sephora, H&M, Zara, Madewell, even Van Cleef & Arpels and Dior, if that’s your thing: Why trek halfway to New Jersey for it when it can already be had in Manhattan? Related has stirred up some effortful buzz around the mall’s Neiman Marcus branch, the city’s first, as if it were a giant panda and Manhattan a zoo. When I stopped by, earlier this week, stylish teen-agers were posing for pictures in front of the trunk half of a yellow cab, filled with dahlias, that had been planted in the store’s entryway. This is what used to be called a photo op and is now called an “experience.” Either way, no quantity of selfies is going to stave off the collapse of traditional brick-and-mortar retail; a few years ago, when the industry was looking really grim, Neiman Marcus nearly pulled out of the development altogether, causing something of a panic at Related.

In that sense, Hudson Yards is a neighborhood of the future—the future that was imagined way back in the Bloomberg administration, when turning the city into a landing pad for the international super-rich was made top priority and sold as a twisted survival strategy. That vision of luxury is all about a frictionless sameness: being able to do and eat and buy the same things, in the same kinds of settings, to the tune of the same ambient music, no matter where on the globe one may be. It’s no wonder that what Hudson Yards really feels like is a nice airport terminal, with the High Line as its moving walkway. (The High Line, which once seemed like a triumph of urban reimagination, now seems to me the embodiment of this narcotic nowhere-ness: a beautiful highway that has sliced through a living neighborhood, Robert Moses style, leaving luxury buildings in its wake.)

There is one thing at Hudson Yards that can’t be found anywhere else: the Vessel, with its twenty-five hundred steps, eighty landings, and hundred and fifty flights of stairs. It was commissioned by Ross to provide an eye-catching center to his corporate kingdom, the rug that ties the room together, and it is perfect for its environment: a triumph of vapidity, banal to its hollow core. In the run-up to its opening, some clever marketing team got critics to start asking if it might be New York’s new Eiffel Tower. It’s a laughable comparison. The Eiffel Tower was daring, original, most of all a shock; it changed the way that the city of Paris looks, and the way that Parisians look at their city. Meanwhile, the Vessel—its name is apparently subject to change, so make your suggestions now—is simply a means by which to look, again, at oneself: a calorie-burning selfie backdrop that is far more attractive in photos than it is in person, where its reflective, rose-gold exterior has already started to smudge. The other day, a group of people was standing inside the thing at ground level, grinning over a glowing disk placed at the center of the floor. They were taking timed selfies: a face, tinged with blue light, framed by the void. (There was a to-do, last week, when it was discovered that the terms and conditions that must be signed in exchange for Vessel tickets granted Hudson Yards the rights to any images or recordings made of it, in perpetuity. The language is, apparently, being changed.) The experience of climbing the Vessel will feel familiar to anyone who has looked, in frustration, for her seat in a sports stadium.

by Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker | Read more:

Image:Related-Oxford/Xinhua/Redux

[ed. See also: Fuck the Vessel (The Baffler), and Expect Billionaire Urbanism to Kill Seattle's Waterfront Area (The Stranger).]

The Senseless Logic of the Wild

The whale sighting happened right away, minutes into Day 1. Jon, Dave and I had just been dropped off on a remote Alaskan shoreline, an hour and a half by boat from the closest speck of a town. Jon was working as a sea-kayaking guide that summer in Glacier Bay National Park, and he had invited us up for a seven-day excursion during his week off. As the boat that delivered us vanished, the drone of its engine dampening into a murmur and then finally trailing off, it became unthinkably quiet on the beach, and the largeness and strangeness of our surroundings were suddenly apparent. It was a familiar phenomenon for Jon from the start of all his trips: a moment that people instinctually paused to soak in. To me, it felt like those scenes of astronauts who, having finally rattled free of the earth’s atmosphere, slip into the stillness of space. Except we weren’t in space. We were on earth — finally, really on earth.

We were only starting to move around again, packing our gear into the kayaks, when we heard the first huff of a blowhole, not far offshore.

Jon was ecstatic. It seemed to him as if the animal were putting on a show, swimming playfully in the kelp, diving, resurfacing, then plowing its open mouth across the surface to feed. He took it as a good omen. Though I had no idea at the time, he was anxious that Dave and I might feel intimidated about making the trip; such a big payoff, so quickly, would get us excited and defuse any apprehensions.

For Dave, the whale-sighting had exactly the opposite effect. Once, when he was a kid, his dad took him scuba diving with dolphins. They were friendly, awe-inspiring creatures, purportedly, but they terrified Dave instead. He could still conjure the feeling of hanging defenselessly in that water while the animals deftly swirled around him, less like solid objects than flashes of reflected light, while he could move only in comparative slow-motion. Ever since, he had harbored a fear of large sea creatures — a niche phobia, particularly for a young man who lived in the Bronx, but a genuine one still. And so, even as Dave understood that a chance to see whales up close like this was a major draw of a kayaking trip in Alaska, and though he feigned being thrilled, some second thoughts were kicking in: We were going out there, he realized.

The whale left me exhilarated and gleeful, like Jon; but deeper down, I also remember feeling shaken, like Dave. Nothing about the animal registered to me as playful or welcoming. It just appeared in the distance, then transited quickly past us, from left to right. My uneasiness had something to do with the whale’s great size and indifference — its obliviousness — as it passed. Watching it made me feel profoundly out of place and register how large that wilderness was, relative to me. (...)

After a spectacular first day of paddling, we came ashore on a rocky tidal flat about two miles from where we were dropped. Jon gave us his detailed tutorial about bear safety while we set up our campsite. He taught us, for example, to holler “Hey, bear!” if we heard any rustling but also preventively, ahead of us, when we walked through the woods. The last thing you wanted was to come across a brown bear unannounced.

“Hey, bear!” Jon kept hollering, by way of demonstration. He said it goofily, like a children’s TV host greeting some down-on-his-luck ursine neighbor at the doorway to their clubhouse. This was intentional. Jon had noticed that the people on his trips often resisted bellowing “Hey, bear!” into the wilderness. It was essential for their safety, but it felt silly or vulnerable somehow, like singing in public. So he learned to turn it into a shtick, spinning it into a stream-of-consciousness narration: Hey, bear, I’m coming into the trees now. Hope you’re having a fantastic evening, Mr. Bear! It loosened everyone up. They were performing for their friends now; the whole group was in on the joke.

I had never seen a wild bear, though I have backpacked in bear country a handful of times. I felt comfortable with the animals in the abstract. But here, the bears weren’t abstract; they breached the material plane. There were bear trails everywhere, leading from the tree line to the water, and disquietingly close, I felt, to where we were pitching our tent. We found heaps of their scat. We saw trees where the animals had slashed off the bark to eat the inner layer, tufts of fur from their paws still plastered in the sap.

I pretended I was having fun. But that evening I grew increasingly petrified, almost delirious. My eyes tightened, scanning for bears. The sound of the wind became bears, and so did the mossy sticks cracking under our feet. I gave myself a migraine, then phased in and out of sleep.

At sunrise, I woke feeling foolish. While Jon cooked pancakes, I reasoned with myself, privately, in a notebook I brought on the trip. I tried to conceive of the situation as a geometry problem. Yes, some number of bears roved this landscape, I wrote: relatively tiny, independent blips, going about their business randomly, just like us. In all that empty space and confusion, a lethal collision of their moving blips and our moving blips would be an improbable coincidence. I’d been distorting those odds, mistaking myself for “the absolute focus of all bears’ attention,” I wrote. It was embarrassing, really. “To be afraid of bears,” I concluded, “is to be narcissistic.”

I was reminding myself that freakishly horrible things are, by definition, unlikely to happen. Even now, my reasoning feels sound.

by Jon Mooallem, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Jon Mooallem

Truth and Transgender Science

An open debate on transgender issues seems to me vital if we are simply to get things right. The trouble is: Many trans activists don’t want a debate. They believe sincerely that such a discussion will inevitably tend toward the question of whether transgender people actually exist. (This is not debatable — they do.) The other trouble is: Many social conservatives don’t want to have a debate either, and they actually do assert that trans people do not exist. They claim that trans people are lying or are mentally ill, despite mounds of empirical evidence proving that transgender identity is real, and unchanging, if only for a small number of people (as of 2016, 1.4 million Americans — or 0.4 percent of the population — identified as transgender). In the middle of this gulf, the truth certainly lies. And it says something about this moment in our culture that the truth doesn’t seem to matter at all.

Hence the absurd “correction” of a study by Brown professor Lisa Littman published by the open-access science journal PLOS One. It was the result of a second peer review of the article that, in the end, changed not a jot of its data or conclusions. It merely “reframed” the article, and added some more context. Two cheers for academic freedom, I guess. Except that the ordeal sends a red flare up to other researchers: Don’t enter this field. It’s trouble.

The study itself examined how a sudden embrace of trans identity during adolescence (where none had been suggested in childhood) might be a function of peer pressure, Internet exposure to transgender materials, a majority-trans peer group, and withdrawal from parents. Littman proposed a description of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, or ROGD:

“[T]hat is distinct in etiology from the gender dysphoria observed in individuals who have previously been described as transgender … The worsening of mental well-being and parent-child relationships and behaviors that isolate teens from their parents, families, non-transgender friends and mainstream sources of information are particularly concerning. More research is needed to better understand this phenomenon, its implications, and scope.”

That’s all Littman was arguing for: more research, please. (And she’s right: her study was limited. Its respondents were all parents, not trans kids; and they were recruited from websites where many families were concerned about a sudden change in a daughter or son. Much more research is needed.)

And it is surely conceivable that trans identity can be, in some cases, mistaken, especially when it seems to come out of nowhere in the midst of puberty. People who detransition later on life absolutely do exist, and they are often unable to reverse permanent alteration of their bodies and endocrine systems. And if teenage trans identity suddenly surges in popularity, it’s surely possible that faddishness or other psychological issues could be at work. The language of “contagion” and “cluster” outbreaks used in the paper does rub the wrong way — because it would seem to imply that being transgender is some sort of disease. But when you think about it more deeply, you realize that the “contagion” is not being transgender but being deluded into thinking you are.

And that seems especially possible given a sharp increase in trans identity among young women, mainly lesbians:

“The adolescent and young adult (AYA) children described were predominantly natal female (82.8%) with a mean age of 16.4 years … Forty-one percent of the AYAs had expressed a non-heterosexual sexual orientation before identifying as transgender. Many (62.5%) of the AYAs had been diagnosed with at least one mental health disorder or neuro-developmental disability prior to the onset of their gender dysphoria.”

What you’re seeing in other words is a big chunk of these women who would previously have become adult lesbians, suddenly deciding in adolescence that they have been male all along. Immediately we are in a zero-sum game: Among these teenagers, transgender identity is replacing lesbian identity. It doesn’t surprise me that some lesbians see this as a form of lesbian and female erasure.

But what truly baffles me is why transgender activists would not want this relatively new phenomenon to be studied. Surely it’s in the interests of transgender people that the diagnosis, whether trans or cis, be accurate — especially when it can lead to permanent, irreversible changes in the physical body: removing genitalia, or flooding a teen girl’s endocrine system with testosterone. And the only way to discover who will or will not be rendered happier by transition is to observe unhappy transitions as well as the liberating kind, to be aware of the mistakes as well as the successes — rather than create an ideological chilling effect, in which we end up learning less. The last thing you want is for there to be a wave of de-transitioning in the future, because so many adolescent diagnoses were wrong. That would set back trans rights a very long way.

My fear is a very old one: that attempts to squelch free inquiry can only, in the end, discredit a good and humane cause, and that when orthodoxy trumps or chills empirical research, we have lost any reliable way to uncover the truth about the world. And, yes, I mean objective, empirical truth.

by Andrew Sullivan, NY Magazine |  Read more:

Ola Bergengren / Stockholm Design Lab
via:

Marie-François Firmin-Girard, Flower Seller on the Pont Royal
via:

Who Cares? Not Voters.

The Democrats’ Complexity Problem (NY Times)

[ed. See also: Warren Focuses On Policy, Which Looks Like A Tough Sell With Voters (NPR), and I Don't Give A Shit How You Bend The Cost Curve (Eschaton).]

‘Us’ and Them

Why Jordan Peele Is the New Master of Suspense

The ending of Us is twisty, unsettling, and oddly shaped. I won’t spoil the surprise, though it demands that viewers retrace and reconsider the film’s narrative structure. Like any worthy brain-bender, it insists upon a rewatch. It’s an audacious choice with clear influences: a Twilight Zone conclusion—an Aha! followed instantly by a Wait, what?—mixed with the despairing and morbidly clever finish of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. If Jordan Peele’s first film, Get Out, signaled the arrival of a singular new voice in genre-driven social satire, his new movie Us declares him something more straightforward: a master of suspense. He makes movies that feel modern, persistent, and wracked with unease—movies that are of a time, and that we will one day use to describe that time. Peele isn’t the first to claim this mantle. Hitchock was the originator, but Rod Serling, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro, and M. Night Shyamalan have staked a claim to the title in the past. It’s a vital but burdensome role in the popular imagination. On the one hand, every new release is an event. On the other hand, every new release has to be an event.

Us is the most compelling and singular major studio release of the year so far—and it’s effective as both disquieting horror and subversive comedy. Whether it works as a grand statement about life in this country is more likely to stoke debate. One thing the film cannot do is offer the surprise of Get Out. When it was released in February 2017, Peele was known primarily as a sketch comedy writer and performer. The phenomenon of Get Out was utterly unpredictable—$255 million at the box office on a $5 million budget, to go with the instantaneous induction of several ideas into the pop cultural phrasebook: The Sunken Place. No, no, no, no, no, no. The spoon and the teacup. Rose, gimme those keys! It became idiomatic—a movie with a living history.

Us, however, is larded with expectations. You can feel it reckoning with the anxiety that’s built into following up a beloved debut. Peele’s intentionality feels both wider and more opaque. “It’s a bit more of a Rorschach than my last picture,” Peele told me last week after the film’s premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival. “It really is about looking within.” I love that Peele encourages viewers to seek out greater meaning in the movies he makes. He’s not a difficult artist or a mysterious Oz pulling levers behind a curtain. Like Hitchcock or Serling, he’s a showman. “I wanted to offer a fun starting point for racial conversation,” Peele told me about Get Out in 2017, “maybe some new touchstones in how we discuss race.” He’s Spielberg for the Reddit set—a populist with a twisted sense of humanity. (...)

For decades, Alfred Hitchcock was held in contempt by certain critics as a one-note trickster, more interested in the gimmickry of cinema—a fright peddler—than the epic, dramatic storytelling that was valorized in his time. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director five times, but never won, often losing to humanists like William Wyler. In the latter stages of his career, thanks to critical reevaluations in Europe and America, his ingenuity and influence came to the fore. He was worshipped and diminished at the same time. But eventually, seven of his films were added to the National Film Registry and four were named among the American Film Institute’s 100 best films of all time. Sight and Sound has named his Vertigo the greatest film ever made. He is now remembered as one of the three or four most important popular filmmakers of the 20th century.

Peele has grabbed hold of Hitchcock’s legacy by imitating some of his cleverest tactics. Both men are crowd-pleasing, coyly comic, and incisively strategic filmmakers working primarily in terror. Both are deeply self-conscious about style. Peele used the word “brand” when describing his work to me earlier this month. But that was unselfconscious. Like Hitchcock, Peele knows that marketing and message are synonyms.

“My creative drive automatically goes toward where I think the audience expectations are, and when I can pinpoint that, I can take them another way,” he says. “I can use that momentum against the audience.” (...)

Suspense is still the primary vehicle for his work, and it ought to be. His knack for tension is astonishing. Us drags you by the eye sockets, leaving you wondering where it’s all heading for two hours. Is this going to be peak Hitchcock or mid-period Shymalan?, I found myself thinking. And then Peele finally tells you what he means. He gives us the information we need. Perhaps too much.

by Sean Fennessey, The Ringer | Read more:
Image: AP Images/Ringer illustration

Big Name Lawsuit Could Upend Realtors and Their 6% Fee

A new class-action lawsuit takes aim at real estate agents and the tools they use to do business, and housing industry watchers say it could revolutionize the way Americans buy and sell the biggest asset they’ll ever own.

The suit was filed in Chicago on behalf of anyone who sold a home through one of 20 of the largest listing services in the country over the past five years. It charges that the mighty Washington-based lobby National Association of Realtors, as well as the four largest national real estate brokerages, and the Multiple Listing Services they use, have conspired to require anyone selling a home to pay the commission of the broker representing their buyer “at an inflated amount,” in violation of federal antitrust law.

Homeowners who are ready to sell their properties usually hire a real-estate agent to represent them by staging the home, photographing it, adding it to the MLS, marketing it, and showing it to prospective buyers. Sellers agree to pay that person a commission on the selling price of the home. That commission has traditionally been known as the “6%,” but it’s a little more complicated than that.

Sellers can really only negotiate with the agent they’ve hired, while agents representing buyers are generally assured of a standard 3% commission. That means that a seller’s agent who’s willing to negotiate, or one that works for a discount brokerage like Redfin will be paid less than a buyer’s agent.

Buyers can choose to be represented by an agent, or to go without one – but in any case, all commission money for both sides of the deal is always paid by the seller, thanks to a 1996 NAR rule known as the “Buyer Broker Commission Rule.”

In order to list a property on one of the many regional databases known as Multiple Listing Services, agents must abide by the Buyer Broker Rule. Listing on the MLS is essential for making a sale, and most MLSs are controlled by local NAR associations.

“The conspiracy has saddled home sellers with a cost that would be borne by the buyer in a competitive market,” the lawsuit says. “Moreover, because most buyer brokers will not show homes to their clients where the seller is offering a lower buyer broker commission, or will show homes with higher commission offers first, sellers are incentivized when making the required blanket, non-negotiable offer to procure the buyer brokers’ cooperation by offering a high commission.”

As MarketWatch has previously reported, many housing observers call Realtors a “cartel” for the way they purposely steer clients to transactions in which traditional ways of doing business are observed.

Rob Hahn is founder and managing partner of 7DS Associates, a real estate consultancy. In a blog posted shortly after the lawsuit was filed, Hahn called it a potential “nuclear bomb on the industry.” And in an interview with MarketWatch, he said that he’s taking it “very seriously.”

In large part, that’s because of the heft of the law firms behind the suit. Both Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, and Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro have a long history of prevailing over weighty entities like Volkswagen, for its emissions scandal, Apple, for its e-book collusion, and Exxon, after the Valdez spill.

In response to a request for comment, NAR said, “The complaint is baseless and contains an abundance of false claims. The U.S. Courts have routinely found that Multiple Listing Services are pro-competitive and benefit consumers by creating great efficiencies in the home-buying and selling process. NAR looks forward to obtaining a similar precedent regarding this filing.”

Still, as Hahn put it, past lawsuits have mostly been filed by what he calls “ambulance-chasers,” not the firms behind some of the biggest civil settlements in American history. (...)

Hahn thinks it’s ironic that an innovation that tried to protect buyers, by providing them with representation in a complex and deeply emotional transaction, has soured the market so badly. Many housing watchers have long argued that real estate services should be paid for a la carte, or in a sliding-scale fee structure, rather than a flat commission, whether that’s 6% or 1%. But, Hahn said, “there’s no chance whatsoever that the industry goes that way voluntarily.”

by Andrea Riquier, Marketwatch |  Read more:

Image: Bloomberg News/Landov

Rick Steves Wants to Set You Free

Rick Steves can tell you how to avoid having your pocket picked on the subway in Istanbul. He can tell you where to buy cookies from cloistered Spanish nuns on a hilltop in Andalusia. He can tell you approximately what percentage of Russia’s gross domestic product comes from bribery. He can teach you the magic idiom that unlocks perfectly complementary gelato flavors in Florence (“What marries well?”).

But Rick Steves does not know his way around New York City.

“In the Western Hemisphere,” Steves told me one afternoon last March, “I am a terrible traveler.”

We were, at that moment, very much inside the Western Hemisphere, 4,000 miles west of Rome, inching through Manhattan in a hired black car. Steves was in the middle of a grueling speaking tour of the United States: 21 cities in 34 days. New York was stop No.17. He had just flown in from Pittsburgh, where he had spent less than 24 hours, and he would soon be off to Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas. In his brief windows of down time, Steves did not go out searching for quaint restaurants or architectural treasures. He sat alone in his hotel rooms, clacking away on his laptop, working on new projects. His whole world, for the time being, had been reduced to a concrete blur of airports, hotels, lecture halls and media appearances.

In this town car, however, rolling through Midtown, Steves was brimming with delight. He was between a TV interview at the New York Stock Exchange and a podcast at CBS, and he seemed as enchanted by all the big-city bustle as the most wide-eyed tourist.

“Look at all the buildings!” he exclaimed. “There’s so much energy! Man, oh, man!”

A woman crossed the street pushing two Yorkies in a stroller.

“How cute!” Steves shouted.

The town car crawled toward a shabby metal hulk spanning the East River.

“Wow!” Steves said. “Is that the Brooklyn Bridge?”

It was almost the opposite of the Brooklyn Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the most recognizable structures in the world: a stretched stone cathedral. This was its unloved upriver cousin, a tangle of discolored metal, vibrating with cars, perpetually under construction. The driver told Steves that it was the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge — or, as most New Yorkers still thought of it, the 59th Street Bridge.

This revelation only increased Steves’s wonder.

“The 59th Street Bridge!” he said. “That’s one of my favorite songs!”

With buoyant enthusiasm, Steves started to sing Simon and Garfunkel’s classic 1966 tune “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

“Slow down, you move too fast,” he sang. “You got to make the mornin’ last — just — kickin’ down the cobblestones. ... ”

The car hit traffic and lurched to a stop. Steves paused to scan the street outside. “Where are the cobblestones?” he asked. Then he refocused. He finished the song with a flourish: “Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ — GROOOVYYYYYY!”

There was a silence in the car.

“Can you imagine those two guys walking around right here?” Steves said. “Just feeling groovy? Gosh, that’s cool.”

Steves pulled out his phone and, for his online fans, recorded a video of himself singing “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy).”

“It’s fun to be in New York City,” he signed off. “Happy travels!”

There was another silence in the car, this one longer.

“You know,” the driver said finally, “you’re not very different than you are on your show.”

This was correct. The driver was referring to Steves’s long-running, widely syndicated, family-friendly public-television travel series, “Rick Steves’ Europe,” on which Steves is a joyful and jaunty host, all eager-beaver smiles and expressive head tilts. With a backpack over one shoulder and a hand tucked into his pocket, Steves gushes poetically about England’s Lake District (“a lush land steeped in a rich brew of history, culture and nature”) and Erfurt, Germany (“this half-timbered medieval town with a shallow river gurgling through its center”) and Istanbul (“this sprawling metropolis on the Bosporus”) and Lisbon (“like San Francisco, but older and grittier and less expensive”). He reclines jauntily atop the cliffs of Dover and is vigorously scrubbed in a Turkish bath. The show has aired now for nearly 20 years, and in that time, among travelers, Steves has established himself as one of the legendary PBS superdorks — right there in the pantheon with Mr. Rogers, Bob Ross and Big Bird. Like them, Steves is a gentle soul who wants to help you feel at home in the world. Like them, he seems miraculously untouched by the need to look cool, which of course makes him sneakily cool. To the aspiring traveler, Steves is as inspirational as Julia Child once was to the aspiring home chef. (...)

Rick Steves is absolutely American. He wears jeans every single day. He drinks frozen orange juice from a can. He likes his hash browns burned, his coffee extra hot. He dislikes most fancy restaurants; when he’s on the road, he prefers to buy a foot-long Subway sandwich and split it between lunch and dinner. He has a great spontaneous honk of a laugh — it bursts out of him, when he is truly delighted, with the sharpness of a firecracker on the Fourth of July. Steves is so completely American that when you stop to really look at his name, you realize it’s just the name Rick followed by the plural of Steve — that he is a one-man crowd of absolutely regular everyday American guys: one Rick, many Steves. Although Steves spends nearly half his life traveling, he insists, passionately, that he would never live anywhere but the United States — and you know when he says it that this is absolutely true. In fact, Steves still lives in the small Seattle suburb where he grew up, and every morning he walks to work on the same block, downtown, where his parents owned a piano store 50 years ago. On Sundays, Steves wears his jeans to church, where he plays the congas, with great arm-pumping spirit, in the inspirational soft-rock band that serenades the congregation before the service starts, and then he sits down and sings classic Lutheran hymns without even needing to refer to the hymnal. Although Steves has published many foreign-language phrase books, the only language he speaks fluently is English. He built his business in America, raised his kids in America and gives frequent loving paeans to the glories of American life.

And yet: Rick Steves desperately wants you to leave America. The tiniest exposure to the outside world, he believes, will change your entire life. Travel, Steves likes to say, “wallops your ethnocentricity” and “carbonates your experience” and “rearranges your cultural furniture.” Like sealed windows on a hot day, a nation’s borders can be stultifying. Steves wants to crack them open, to let humanity’s breezes circulate. The more rootedly American you are, the more Rick Steves wants this for you. If you have never had a passport, if you are afraid of the world, if your family would prefer to vacation exclusively at Walt Disney World, if you worry that foreigners are rude and predatory and prone to violence or at least that their food will give you diarrhea, then Steves wants you — especially you — to go to Europe. Then he wants you to go beyond. (For a majority of his audience, Steves says, “Europe is the wading pool for world exploration.”) Perhaps, like him, you will need large headphones and half a tab of Ambien to properly relax on the flight, but Steves wants you to know that it will be worth it. He wants you to stand and make little moaning sounds on a cobblestone street the first time you taste authentic Italian gelato — flavors so pure they seem like the primordial essence of peach or melon or pistachio or rice distilled into molecules and stirred directly into your own molecules. He wants you to hike on a dirt path along a cliff over the almost-too-blue Mediterranean, with villages and vineyards spilling down the rugged mountains above you. He wants you to arrive at the Parthenon at dusk, just before it closes, when all the tour groups are loading back onto their cruise ships, so that you have the whole place to yourself and can stand there feeling like a private witness to the birth, and then the ruination, of Western civilization.

by Sam Anderson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Zachary Scott
[ed. See also: There Is No Reason to Cross the U.S. by Train. But I Did It Anyway. (NY Times).]

I’m Worried I’ll Never Get Around to Using All These Good Band Names

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to face up to the fact that he’ll never achieve all his dreams. I’ve made my peace with the knowledge that I will probably never win an Oscar, date a supermodel, or own a dune buggy. But there’s one dream I can’t let go, and I know if I don’t make it happen I’ll regret it to the end of my days. What if I never create a musical group using these hilarious potential band names I’ve catalogued in my notebook over the years? What if I die tomorrow and I never appeared on stage sporting a bass drum with the name Cephalopod Anxiety or Tainted Meat Panic on it?

Like most young men, my dream of starting a band with a striking word combination I’d come across in a newspaper or book began when I read Dave Barry’s column. I’ll never forget those Saturday mornings on the couch, reading Barry’s latest with my dad, and laughing at the hilarious phrases he’d say would make good band names. I knew then and there that my destiny was to lead a series of bands with names like Hypogonad, Suburban Inferno, and Exploded Whale Carcass.

My dream came so close to fruition my senior year in college, when my roommate Jim and I started a “pop-thresh garage-inflected post-grunge” band. Naturally, I wanted to call the band Charismatic Megafauna, but Jim said that was “too whimsical” and he booked gigs under the name Midwaste instead. As you might imagine, Midwaste didn’t last long, and neither did our friendship.

After college, I was too busy with grad school and then my career to catalogue good band names, let alone start one and book gigs as Rectal Abrasions or Highway Jellyfish Disaster. One morning I woke up after a particularly grueling day at the office and found a new entry in my trusty notebook of band names. I must have written it in a fit of inspiration in the middle of the night. But instead of a flash of brilliance, I’d jotted down: “Band Names? Desk Metal. The Spreadsheets. Stale Bagel.” Clearly, my creativity was gone. I sank into an unmitigated funk, one so bad I didn’t even realize Unmitigated Funk is a great band name.

I quit my stifling office job after that, but by then I’d married and had a kid, which gave me ample material for band names (Diaper Cake, Cradle Cap, Newborn Jaundice), but no time to actually put a band together. I haven’t even touched my guitar since my son was born.

Now I’m staring down forty, and while I have a notebook full of names like Forty Rabid Squirrels, Caution Crow, Weird Uncle, Hobo Pie Revival, and Fugu Toxin Nightmares, I can’t claim to have performed a single gig. The last time I was even on a stage was that night in ‘04 when Midwaste took home 18th place at the Naperville, IL Battle of the Bands.

by Austin Gilkeson, Points in Case | Read more:
Image: via

The Obama Boys

If you want to understand why leftists look back on the Obama years with such a sense of frustration and disappointment, all you need to do is pick up one of the White House memoirs written by members of Obama’s staff. I’ve now poked through three of them, David Litt’s Thanks Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, Dan Pfeiffer’s Yes We (Still) Can, and Ben Rhodes’ The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, plus a collection of first-person testimonies called Obama: An Oral History.* But the genre is expansive, and also includes Pat Cunnane’s West Winging It (with a front cover almost indistinguishable from Litt’s book), Alyssa Mastromonaco’s Who Thought This Was A Good Idea? (which at least asks the right question), and a second oral history volume called West Wingers: Stories from the Dream Chasers, Change Makers, and Hope Creators Inside the Obama White House.

I can’t say that once you have read one of these books, you have read them all. But if you read Litt, Pfeiffer, and Rhodes, you may get a sense that you have met the same man three times. Not only does each tell the same story, but they share common habits of mind, common interpretations of the same events, that reveal a lot about what “Obamaism” as a political mindset is. They have their differences: Litt’s book is breezy and jokey, Pfeiffer is obsessively focused on “fake news,” and Rhodes is slightly more cerebral and worldly (he was a foreign policy guy, after all). But each of them looks at politics through roughly the same lens, and reading their accounts can help to show why the left dislikes this kind of politics.

Let’s remember what the left critique of Obama’s administration is. Leftists argue, roughly, that while Obama came in with lofty promises of “hope” and “change,” the change was largely symbolic rather than substantive, and he failed to stand up for progressive values or fight for serious shifts in U.S. policy. He deported staggering numbers of immigrants, let Wall Street criminals off the hook, failed to take on (and now proudly boasts of his support for) the fossil fuel industry, sold over $100 billion in arms to the brutal Saudi government, killed American citizens with drones (and then made sickening jokes about it), killed lots more non-American citizens with drones (including Yemenis going to a wedding) and then misled the public about it, promised “the most transparent administration ever” and then was “worse than Nixon” in his paranoia about leakers, pushed a market-friendly healthcare plan based on conservative premises instead of aiming for single-payer, and showered Israel with both public support and military aid even as it systematically violated the human rights of Palestinians (Here, for example, is Haaretz: “Unlike [George W.] Bush, who gave Israel’s Iron Dome system a frosty response, Obama has led the way in funding and supporting the research, development and production of the Iron Dome”). Obama’s defenders responded to every single criticism by insisting that Obama had his hands tied by a Republican congress, but many of the things Obama did were freely chosen. In education policy, he hired charterization advocate Arne Duncan and pushed a horrible “dog-eat-dog” funding system called “Race To The Top.” Nobody forced him to hire Friedmanite economists like Larry Summers, or actual Republicans like Robert Gates, or to select middle-of-the-road judicial appointees like Elena Kagan and Merrick Garland. Who on Earth picks Rahm Emanuel, out of every person in the world, to be their chief of staff?

Centrism and compromise were central to Obama’s personal philosophy from the start. The speech that put him on the map in 2004 was famous for its declaration that there was no such thing as “blue” and “red” America, just the United States of America. A 2007 New Yorker profile said that “in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.” Obama spoke of being “postpartisan,” praised Ronald Reagan, gave culturally conservative lectures about how Black people supposedly needed to stop wearing gold chains and feeding their children fried chicken for breakfast. From his first days in office, there simply didn’t seem to be much of a “fighting” spirit in Obama. Whenever he said something daring and controversial (and correct), he would fail to stand by it. For example, when he publicly noted that the Cambridge police force acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr. for trying to break into his own home, he followed up by inviting the police officer and Gates to sit down and talk things out over a beer. A disgusted Van Jones has characterized this as the “low point” of the Obama presidency, but the desire to be “all things to all people” had always been central to the Obama image. Matt Taibbi described him during his first campaign as:

…an ingeniously crafted human cipher… a sort of ideological Universalist… who spends a great deal of rhetorical energy showing that he recognizes the validity of all points of view, and conversely emphasizes that when he does take hard positions on issues, he often does so reluctantly… You can’t run against him on issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological spectrum. (...)

Obama supporters think all of this is deeply cynical and unfair. But those who want to argue that Obama was the proponent of a genuinely transformational progressive politics, his ambitions tragically stifled by the ideological hostility of reactionaries, have to contend with a few damning pieces of evidence: the books of Pfeiffer, Rhodes, and Litt.

Granted, these men are all devoted admirers of Obama who set out to defend his legacy. But in telling stories intended to make Obama and his staff look good, they end up affirming that the left’s cynicism was fully warranted. Litt, for instance, seems to have been a man with almost no actual political beliefs. Recently graduated from Yale when he joined the campaign, he was never much of an “activist.” Litt was drawn to Obama not because he felt that Obama would actually bring particular changes that he wanted to see happen, but because he developed an emotional obsession with Barack Obama as an individual person. Pfeiffer feels similarly—he fell in “platonic political love.” Litt’s book begins:

On January 3, 2008, I pledged my heart and soul to Barack Obama… My transformation was immediate and all-consuming. One moment I was a typical college senior, barely interested in politics. The next moment I would have done anything, literally anything, for a freshman senator from Illinois.

He describes the beginning of his brainless infatuation: “[Obama] spoke like presidents in movies. He looked younger than my dad. I didn’t have time for a second thought, or even a first one. I simply believed.”

Paul Krugman’s 2008 warning that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,” and Reed’s idea that Obama supporters radiated “faddish, utterly uninformed exuberance,” is confirmed by Litt’s account of his own political awakening. Throughout the book, Litt is humorously self-effacing, so it can be difficult to tell just how serious he is in his “kidding but not really” observations. But when he describes the religious fervor with which he unthinkingly embraced Obama’s candidacy, he seems to be at least partly serious:

We had no doubt that everyone would soon see the light… Our critics would later mock the depths of our devotion. Obamabots, they’d call us. And really, weren’t they right? Becoming obsessed with Barack Obama wasn’t a choice I made… My switch had been flipped… Obama wasn’t just fighting for change. He was change. He was the messenger and message all at once. It’s one thing to follow a prophet who speaks glowingly of a promised land. It’s another thing entirely to join him once he parts the sea… Given the circumstances, it seemed selfish not to spread the good news. Overnight, my friends found themselves living with an evangelist. (...)

My colleague Luke Savage has analyzed how pernicious the influence of The West Wing was on a generation of young Democratic politicos, and sure enough Litt says that “like nearly every Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin.” (More accurately, of course, is “nearly every wealthy white male Democrat who worked in Washington.” The near total absence of women and people of color in top positions on The West Wing may give more viewing pleasure to a certain audience demographic over others.) Litt says in college he “watched West Wing DVDs on an endless loop,” and Pfeiffer too describes “watching The West Wing on a loop.”

Luke describes the kind of mentality this leads to: a belief that “doing politics” means that smart, virtuous people in charge make good decisions for the people, who themselves are rarely seen. Social movements don’t exist, even voters don’t exist. Instead, the political ideal is a PhD economist president (Jed Bartlet) consulting with a crack team of Ivy League underlings and challenging the ill-informed (but well-intended) Republicans with superior logic and wit. During the West Wing’s seven seasons, the Bartlet administration has very few substantive political accomplishments, though as Luke points out it “warmly embraces the military-industrial complex, cuts Social Security, and puts a hard-right justice on the Supreme Court in the interests of bipartisan ‘balance.’” It has always struck me as funny that Sorkin’s signature West Wing shot is the “walk and talk,” in which characters strut down hallways having intense conversations but do not actually appear to be going anywhere. What better metaphor could there be for a politics that consists of looking knowledgeable and committed without any sense of what you’re aiming at or how to get there? Litt says of Obama that “he spoke like presidents in movies.” Surely we can all see the problem here: Presidents in movies do not pass and implement single-payer healthcare. (They mostly bomb nameless Middle Eastern countries.)

Their West Wing-ism meant that the Obama staffers completely lacked an understanding of how political interests operate, and were blindsided when it turned out Republicans wanted to destroy them rather than collaborate to enact Reasonable Bipartisan Compromises. Jim Messina, Obama’s deputy chief of staff and reelection campaign manager, spoke to a key Republican staffer after the 2008 election and was shocked when she told him: “We’re not going to compromise with you on anything. We’re going to fight Obama on everything.” Messina replied “That’s not what we did for Bush.” Said the Republican: “We don’t care.” Rhodes and Pfeiffer, in particular, are shocked and appalled when Republicans turn out to be more interested in their own political standing than advancing the objective well-being of the country.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Mark Wilson/Getty via

[ed. So far, the only candidate I see talking about specifics (which get little to no attention from the media) is Elizabeth Warren. Bernie has the vision but seems too vague on the details. The rest? See also: Beto O'Rourke Is the Candidate For Vapid Morons (Paste). And: Unlikely Journeys (The Baffler).]

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It's Scary How Much Personal Data People Leave on Used Laptops and Phones

In a dusty plastic bin under my bed lies at least four laptops, six cellphones, and a half-dozen hard drives. I have no idea what’s on any of them. Most of these devices predate the cloud-storage era, and so likely contain solitary copies of photos, texts, and emails, among other confidential files (porn?) that I’d probably be horrified to learn had fallen into the hands of strangers.

In retrospect, I should’ve taken a sledgehammer to my pile of electronic garbage long ago, or maybe tossed it into a burn barrel before soaking the charred remains in a bath of hydrochloric acid. Overkill? Maybe not.

A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his home in Wisconsin. It turned out they contain a wealth of private data belonging to their former owners, including a ton of personally identifiable information (PII)—the bread and butter of identity theft.

Frantz amassed a respectable stockpile of refurbished, donated, and used hardware: 41 desktops and laptops, 27 pieces of removable media (memory cards and flash drives), 11 hard disks, and six cellphones. The total cost of the experiment was a lot less than you’d imagine. “I visited a total of 31 businesses and bought whatever I could get my hands on for a grand total of around $600,” he said.

Frantz used a Python-based optical character recognition (OCR) tool to scan for Social Security numbers, dates of birth, credit card information, and other sensitive data. And the result was, as you might expect, not good.

The pile of junk turned out to contain 41 Social Security numbers, 50 dates of birth, 611 email accounts, 19 credit card numbers, two passport numbers, and six driver’s license numbers. Additionally, more than 200,000 images were contained on the devices and over 3,400 documents. He also extracted nearly 150,000 emails. (...)

A similar study at the University of Hertfordshire recent found that more than two-thirds of used USB drives sold in the U.S. and U.K. still contained the data of their previous owners. Out of 100 drives purchased in the U.S., 64 had data that was deleted deleted, but could easily be recovered.

The important thing to remember is that when a file appears to be deleted, it may not be. On a desktop or laptop computer, when a user deletes a file, the operating system mere flags the space that the data occupies as available to be overwritten. Without this, the workflow would get bogged down, as data erasure is actually more time consuming than you might think. Fifty gigabytes of space, for instance, could take up to an hour or more to properly wipe. Unless the space is overwritten, deleted files can be easily recovered.

There are a lot of tools available to help users properly sanitize a hard disk, such as BitRaser and BitBleach. Used properly, these will generally overwrite data thoroughly enough that most commercial forensic data-recovery tools will be fairly useless. (More authoritative methodologies can be read here.) Frantz recommends using DBAN, also known as Darik’s Boot and Nuke.

by Dell Cameron, Gizmodo |  Read more:

Image: Jason Rollette (YouTube)

[ed. And thumb drives and memory cards. See also: Please, for the Love of God, Make Sure You Delete Things Properly (Gizmodo).]

Proposed New Weather Symbols

Tom Gauld
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In Praise of Selfish NFL Players

The idea that NFL players might put themselves before their team is a scary proposition for the league. Because if the players really start understanding their own value, they just might get what they’re actually worth.

The wide receiver Antonio Brown did. After months of friction with the Pittsburgh Steelers, where he was a key piece of the offense, and with the quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Brown pushed his way out of the team. Last week, the Steelers dealt him to the Oakland Raiders.

For this, Brown has been categorized as selfish and petulant. “To be able to play with an all-time quarterback like he’s able to play with, I don’t think he understands how good he has it,” the respected veteran wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald said at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference earlier this month, before the trade materialized. “It can get tough out there.” The additional $30 million in guaranteed salary that Brown received from his new team has been cast as a reward for abandoning his old one. “Antonio Brown quit on his teammates & exhibited highly erratic behavior,” the NFL analyst Ross Tucker tweeted, “and as a result got a $20M raise with $30M guaranteed. Great lesson for all the kids out there.”

NFL players are expected to sacrifice everything—from their body to their mental health—for the game and for their team. Yet there are more and more signs that players are starting to understand their leverage. Their increased awareness might be born out of professional jealousy. Brown’s contract with the Steelers contained no guaranteed money over the next three seasons. NFL players look over at their NBA brethren and see that they have guaranteed contracts—and far more say-so with their team and in league matters.

There is also a wide salary disparity between the leagues. In 2019, the Detroit Lions quarterback Matt Stafford is slated to make $29.5 million, the highest salary in the NFL. But that’s not even Mike Conley money. Conley, the Memphis Grizzlies point guard, is making a little more than $30 million this season.

It’s noteworthy that a few weeks before his trade, Brown appeared on LeBron James’s HBO talk show, The Shop. The point of the The Shop is to create a keep-it-a-buck vibe; guests like Brown can have candid conversations with other black superstar athletes and entertainers who face similar problems. The most revealing conversation during Brown’s appearance on the show came when Brown, James, the rapper 2 Chainz, the actor Jamie Foxx, and the NBA’s Anthony Davis spoke candidly about realizing their own power.

“As the CEO of my own business, I got the power,” said Davis, who also is dealing with serious criticism after telling his team, the New Orleans Pelicans, in late January that he wished to be traded. “I’m doing what I want to do and not what somebody’s telling me to do,” Davis added.

Davis’s feeling of empowerment owes something to James, who—through the way he’s handled his own free agency, his production company, and other Hollywood ventures—has given this generation of superstar athletes a blueprint for controlling their own careers. NBA players like Davis and James, unlike Brown under his Steelers contract, have what many would call “screw you” money. (...)

Not every player can do what Brown did, because not every player has Brown’s record-breaking abilities. He’s the first player in NFL history to have six straight seasons with 100 receptions or more. His talent all but ensured that another team was going to want him, regardless of his issues in Pittsburgh.

“I was proud of him,” said the former NFL star wide receiver Terrell Owens, who had such a vicious contract battle with the Philadelphia Eagles that it resulted in Owens being suspended for multiple games before being ruled inactive for the rest of the 2005 season. “He used his productivity to create leverage.”

by Jemele Hill, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Charles LeClaire/USA Today Sports/Reuters

Microsoft, Facebook, Trust and Privacy

• There are strong parallels between organised abuse of Facebook and FB’s attempts to respond, in the last 24 months, and malware on Windows and Office and Microsoft’s attempts to respond, 20 years ago.

• Initial responses in both cases have taken two paths: tactical changes to development and API practices to try to make the existing model more secure, and attempts to scan for known bad actors and bad behavior (virus scanners then and human moderators now).

• Microsoft’s malware problem, however, this was not the long-term answer: instead the industry changed what security looked like by moving to SaaS and the cloud and then to fundamentally different operating system models (ChromeOS, iOS) that make the malware threat close to irrelevant. 

• Facebook’s pivot towards messaging and end-to-end encryption is (partly) an attempt to do the same: changing the model so that the threat is irrelevant. But where the move to SaaS and new operating systems happened largely without Microsoft, Facebook is trying to drive the change itself. 

________________________________

Way back in 1995, when they were just a hundred and fifty million PCs on Earth, somebody had a wonderful idea. Or, as the Grinch would say, a wonderful, terrible idea.

Microsoft had put a huge amount of effort into turning Office into an open development platform. All sorts of large and small businesses had created programs (called ‘macros’) that were embedded inside Office documents and allowed them to create wonderful automated workflows, and there was a big developer community around creating and extending this.

But the Grinch realized that there was an API for looking at your address book, an API for sending email and an API for making a macro run automatically when you opened a document. If you put these together in the right order, then you had a virus that would email itself to everybody you knew inside an innocuous-looking Word document, and as soon as they opened it it would spread to everyone they knew.

This was the ‘Concept’ virus, and it actually only infected about 35,000 computers. But four years later ‘Melissa’, doing much the same thing, really did go viral: at one point it even shut down parts of the Pentagon.

I've been reminded of this ancient history a lot in the last year or two as I’ve looked at news around abuse and hostile state activity on Facebook, YouTube and other social platforms, because much like the Microsoft macro viruses, the ‘bad actors’ on Facebook did things that were in the manual. They didn’t prise open a locked window at the back of the building - they knocked on the front door and walked in. They did things that you were supposed to be able to do, but combined them in an order and with malign intent that hadn’t really been anticipated.

It’s also interesting to compare the public discussion of Microsoft and of Facebook before these events. In the 1990s, Microsoft was the ‘evil empire’, and a lot of the narrative within tech focused on how it should be more open, make it easier for people to develop software that worked with the Office monopoly, and make it easier to move information in and out of its products. Microsoft was ‘evil’ if it did anything to make life harder for developers. Unfortunately, whatever you thought of this narrative, it pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this use case. Here, Microsoft was too open, not too closed.

Equally, in the last 10 years many people have argued that Facebook is too much of a ‘walled garden’ - that is is too hard to get your information out and too hard for researchers to pull information from across the platform. People have argued that Facebook was too restrictive on how third party developers could use the platform. And people have objected to Facebook's attempts to enforce the single real identities of accounts. As for Microsoft, there may well have been justice in all of these arguments, but also as for Microsoft, they pointed in the wrong direction when it came to this particular scenario. For the Internet Research Agency, it was too easy to develop for Facebook, too easy to get data out, and too easy to change your identity. The walled garden wasn’t walled enough.

The parallel continues when we think about how these companies and the industry around them tried to react to this abuse of their platforms:

• In 2002, Bill Gates wrote a company-wide memo entitled ‘Trustworthy Computing, which signaled a shift in how the company thought about the security of its products. Microsoft would try to think much more systematically about avoiding creating vulnerabilities and about how ‘bad actors’ might use the tools it chose to create, to try to reduce the number opportunities for abuse. 

• At the same time, there was a boom in security software (first from third parties and then from Microsoft as well) that tried to scan for known bad software, and scan the behavior of software already on the computer for things that might signal it’s a previously unknown bad actor.

Conceptually, this is almost exactly what Facebook has done: try to remove existing opportunities for abuse and avoid creating new ones, and scan for bad actors.

(It’s worth noting that these steps were precisely what people had previously insisted was evil - Microsoft deciding what code you can run on your own computer and what APIs developers can use, and Facebook deciding (people demanding that Facebook decide) who and what it distributes.)

However, while Microsoft’s approach was all about trying to make the existing model safe from abuse, over the last two decades the industry has moved to new models that make the kinds of abuse that targeted Microsoft increasingly irrelevant. The development environment moved from Win32 to the cloud, and the client moved from Windows (and occasionally Mac) to the web browser and then increasing to devices where the whole concept of viruses and malware is either impossible or orders of magnitude mode difficult, in the form of ChromeOS, iOS and to some extent also Android.

If there is no data stored on your computer then compromising the computer doesn’t get an attacker much. An application can’t steal your data if it’s sandboxed and can’t read other applications’ data. An application can’t run in the background and steal your passwords if applications can’t run in the background. And you can’t trick a user into installing a bad app if there are no apps. Of course, human ingenuity is infinite, and this change just led to the creation of new attack models, most obviously phishing, but either way, none of this had much to do with Microsoft. We ‘solved’ viruses by moving to new architectures that removed the mechanics that viruses need, and where Microsoft wasn’t present.

In other words, where Microsoft put better locks and a motion sensor on the windows, the world is moving to a model where the windows are 200 feet off the ground and don’t open.

So.

Last week Mark Zuckerberg wrote his version of Bill Gates’ ‘Trustworthy Computing’ memo - ‘A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking’. There are a lot of interesting things in this, but in the context of this discussion, two things matter:

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Living the (Affluent) Influencer Life

This Isn't The First College Scandal Lori Loughlin's Family Has Been Involved In (Refinery 29)

In August of 2018, Olivia Jade posted a video in which she answered fan questions. One question was about how she would balance her online career with her college aspirations. At the time of the video, Olivia Jade was about to move into a dorm at USC in Los Angeles.

“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend, but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone and hope that I can try and balance it all,” Olivia revealed in the YouTube video. "I do want the experience of like game days, partying. I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.” (...)

Olivia Jade may not have been stoked to attend classes, but she did benefit from her student status. She posted sponsored content from Amazon Prime which focused on her freshman dorm room.

"Officially a college student! It’s been a few weeks since I moved into my dorm and I absolutely love it," Olivia Jade wrote on Instagram. "I got everything I needed from Amazon with @primestudent and had it all shipped to me in just two-days."

Image: via

[ed. Her 'brand' in tatters, parents facing criminal charges, and Wikipedia entries that'll detail the whole sordid story for the rest of their lives, this is quite a convergence of issues: social media, a dysfunctional educational system, celebrity, helicopter parenting, the 'influencer' economy, financial privilege, etc. I think the word is schadenfruede. See also: A for Effort (The Baffler).]

Miwa Yanagi
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Lô Borges